Perry takes the pledge

Bob Vander Plaats, the conservative Christian activist in Iowa who staged last Saturday’s Thanksgiving Family Forum in Des Moines for the GOP presidential hopefuls, has said that his organization, the Family Leader, won’t be endorsing anyone who doesn’t sign the group’s pledge to oppose gay marriage. After four months of waiting, Rick Perry signed the pledge this morning, the Des Moines Register reports.

Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum are the only other candidates to sign it so far.

Bachman signed it early in her campaign, when she was leading in the polls in Iowa and elsewhere, despite controversial language in the pledge that made some candidates skittish. Language in the preamble of the document suggested that slavery offered more of a pro-family climate for African Americans than life today. Vander Plaats later removed the language but not before Bachmann and Santorum had signed.

The 14-point pledge commits a signee to support the Defense of Marriage Act, personal fidelity to the signee’s spouse, appointment of “faithful constitutionalists” as judges and eliminating anti-marriage elements in divorce, tax and
welfare laws. The signee also pledges to protect women and children from pornography and reject Sharia law because it is a “form of totalitarian control.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, thrice married, has said he would sign the pledge if he could tinker with it a bit. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has declined to sign. Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, who’s also running for the GOP presidential nomination, called the pledge “offensive and unRepublican” and “nothing short of a promise to discriminate against everyone who makes a personal choice that doesn’t fit into a particular definition of ‘virtue.’”

Vander Plaats, 48, is a controversial figure in Iowa. He’s run for governor three times, losing each time in the GOP primary, and yet he wields great influence among Iowa evangelicals. In 2008, he ran Mike Huckabee’s campaign in Iowa, and the Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor won the Iowa Caucus. “Since he can’t be king, he’ll be kingmaker,” Drake University political scientist Dennis Goldford told me last week.

Perry, now mired in single digits in Iowa and desperately trying to re-energize his campaign, is on TV constantly in the Hawkeye state. A tap on the shoulder from the Vander Plaats sceptre would be extremely useful.